Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire

First, a word about the author. Kurt Anderson was born in 1954 and grew up in Nebraska. He went to Harvard College and was an editor of the Harvard Lampoon. He co-founded Spy magazine and was editor-in-chief of New York magazine. He co-created and hosted the radio program Studio 360 that became a podcast. He has written three novels. He has a sponge-like mind, soaking up American culture for seven decades. In Fantasyland, he is mopping it up.

Second, a word about how the book got into my hands. I went to France in June for the annual visit to my ancestral home in Normandy. The best single day on this trip, however, was June 17 when I spent the whole day in Paris with three members of my India XVI Peace Corps group (1965-67). One of them is in the process of moving with his wife from Texas to the home of his daughter who married a French man and lives in a Paris suburb. One of them moved with his wife from Baltimore MD 3-4 years ago to Porto, Portugal, and flew up for our mini-reunion. The third one is married to an Austrian foreign service officer who has been posted to Brussels for the past four (or more) years and took the train to Paris. This third friend gifted each of us a different book. Fantasyland is the book he gave to me.

Now I can start the review. For this, I feel supremely unqualified. Among all the writing I've done since my first serious publication in 1985, I don't believe there is a single book review. Instead of trying to fake it or resorting to AI, I'm going to keep it very short.

In this roughly 450-page book, Kurt Anderson describes how a particular fantasy mindset existed among the Pilgrims and Puritans who arrived in North America in the 1600s and how it persisted decade after decade right up to its apotheosis (can it get worse?) in the second Trump Administration.

The first half of the book had me laughing often. Part of the humor was in the many and varied fantasies Anderson describes; part of it was in his way of describing it. The second half of the book, which begins in the 1980s, seemed to drag. Maybe because so many of the new fantasies repeated older ones. Maybe because so many of the fantasies in the past 40 years are ones that I witnessed personally, so I knew the details he lays out.

Instead of boring you with more of my words, here are a few snippets from the book:

"Little by little for centuries, then more and more and faster and faster during the last half-century, Americans have given ourselves over to all kinds of magical thinking, anything-goes relativism, and belief in fanciful explanation, small and large fantasies that console or thrill or terrify us. And most of us haven't realized how far-reaching our strange new normal has become. The cliché would be the frog in the gradually warming pot, oblivious to its doom until too late." (p5)

"America began as a fever dream, a myth, a happy delusion, a fantasy." (p15)

". . . out of the new Protestant religion [in Europe], a new proto-American attitude emerged during the 1500s. Millions of ordinary people decided that they, each of them, had the right to decide what was true or untrue, regardless of what fancy experts said. And furthermore, [they believed,] passionate fantastical belief was the key to everything." (p17)

". . . I'm proposing that the Second Great Awakening in the first half of the 1800s was just one part of something larger--the Great Delirium. During this First Great Delirium, new fantasies of every sort erupted--not just religious but cultural, pseudoscientific, utopian, and political, all variously radiant and lurid, feeding one another in a synergistic national crucible." (p59)

Fantasyland was published in 2017, in the first Trump presidency. If we were experiencing the apotheosis of fantasyland then, what is it now? We've taken another great leap into the unknowable by re-electing Trump. On top of this political evolution, we have now brought Artificial Intelligence into everyday life.

Anderson wrote a sequel that was published in 2020: Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America. Anderson's Wikipedia entry says this book "discusses how the resulting unfettered laissez-faire approach to capitalism [from the 1970s through 2020] has produced an extreme level of economic inequality and disempowered majority." I'm not recommending this book and not planning to buy it. It seems too serious.

By contrast, the first half of Fantasyland is a kind of Monty Python treatment of US history. It is solid, fact-based history with a wicked sense of humor.